Needs assessment to move on to implementation stage

The NunatuKavut Community Health Needs Assessment was recently unveiled by the NunatuKavut Community Council. The assessment provides a comprehensive and thorough review of the health of NunatuKavut residents on the south coast of Labrador. It identifies factors that influence health, determines gaps in health-related services and the appropriate ways to address them. The assessment began in 2009 and is the result of collaboration involving the NCC, the Labrador-Grenfell Health Authority, government, community members, non-profit organizations, Dalhousie University and Memorial University of Newfoundland. “Our hope from the outset of this project was to help inform Labrador-Grenfell Regional Health Authority how it can adapt its services to better meet the needs of our people. In order to start this process we needed to identify what some of our health needs included,” said NCC Health and Social Sector Manager Darlene Wall. The assessment found that Inuit knowledge about health was dismissed in favour of non-Indigenous approaches and didn’t take into consideration the Inuit belief of interconnectedness. The next phase of the project will be to strike a steering committee to implement recommendations. Some of the recommendations require significant financial, social, human, and time resources to implement, while others require significantly fewer resources.